If you stop and think about it, the term “survival” can apply to virtually every minute of our lives, as nobody is ever really trying to do anything but “survive”, right? That being said, even the most seasoned of video game creators will be hard-pressed to make a game about a random Joe Schmoe sitting in his favorite chair reading War and Peace anywhere near an interesting experience. 

That’s why all the actually enjoyable Survival games aren’t simply about being alive, but fighting to stay alive against dangerous, even impossible odds, showing that even the most insurmountable forces out there are no match for the indomitable human spirit. And those are the games that we’ll be showing you today. Sorry, Joe.

And since I think most people reading this probably get the gist about what a “Survival Game” is about without me going into the finer details about the genre as a whole, what do you say we skip that step and get straight into the games? Sounds good to you guys? Great, then let’s get into it.

#15: Rust (PC/Mac/PS4/Xbox One)

Rust - Official Trailer

You wake up naked on the cold shores of a mysterious island, with nobody around you, and nothing but your wits, a torch, and a big rock you found to help you survive in this strange new world you’ve found yourself in. There are no rules in Rust except to keep yourself alive, as it’s entirely up to you to make sure you survive in a hostile world where everything wants to kill you. Manage your hunger and your thirst, craft the necessary supplies, and even build up your own base out of gathered materials so you have a place to call home, all while avoiding the hostile wildlife and even the other inhabitants of this lawless island.

Rust gives players virtually limitless choices when it comes to how they’ll etch out their own survival when faced with a world where everything wants you dead. Players will have to either craft or scavenge their own weapons from across the procedurally generated map, along with their own food, building supplies, and even clothing as well. Once you have enough decent supplies you can begin exploring even further inland, where you’ll find abandoned buildings and other signs of modern civilization that can both possess new opportunities as well as new threats. Sometimes across the island, the outside world will make itself known, either through events like a cargo plane randomly airdropping in supply caches, or when a cargo ship sails by the island and you’ll have to use a boat if you wish to pirate its contents.

Staying alive against wild wolves or even bears is just one thing, however, since due to Rust’s solely multiplayer gameplay the most prominent threat to your survival is the existence of other players. Not only are you fighting for food and water, gathering weapons, and building up your own towering base made entirely through custom materials, but so are dozens of other real-life players across the island, and chances are that those other players will want to take everything they can from you the first chance they get. If there’s one thing that Rust does well, it brings out a player’s desire to survive in an often ugly fashion, creating a “me against them” feeling across the island which often leads to players thinking the only option is to fight one another. Though sometimes it is possible to run into friendly players, it’s just that the sense of paranoia that Rust fuels in its players can make that a rather rare occurrence.

Rust was created by Facepunch Studios, who you may know better for being founded by Garry Newman, creator of the widely known Garry’s Mod, and was released first in Steam Early Access in 2014, then fully released later in early 2018. For most players and reviewers alike, Rust is a double-edged sword of a game, because while it does possess a vast world with entertaining exploration elements, with a wide array of vehicles to be discovered or even built, and an expansive base-building system where players can slowly evolve from simple wooden shacks to sprawling bases powered by electricity, Rust also provides no real grand purpose other than simply just to survive. On top of having no real structured endgame for players, the devs also provide no incentives either way for players to be good to other players or not, as encouraging players to “play nice” is detrimental to the developer’s view of how the game should be played. This of course can either be seen as a bonus or a detriment depending on the player being asked.

At its core, Rust is a great game in the sense that it has a wide variety of items to be crafted and found, places to discover and ways for you to find them, and a great base-building system that allows players to creatively make whatever they can think of if they have the resources. But on the other hand, all of your time spent gathering items and building your base can be taken away by one ruthless player with better gear who sees no problems with tearing away your hours of progress, as Rust encourages players to play how they want. So, in the end, it’s really up to you how you want to rate a Game like Rust, since even if you want to argue against the PvP element, that itself is still a core part of many survival games with multiplayer elements. In my opinion, Rust is a “great, but not brilliant” game, as it will provide you with plenty of fun when engaging in the usual fare of survival game elements, but there’s still a lot of jankiness that can come with the experience. I would recommend buying Rust during a Steam sale event if you want to get the most gameplay value out of the money you’ll be spending on it.

Fight for survival along elaborate train networks, through the air in a helicopter, inside an undersea base, and much more as you scavenge and build your way to the top of the food chain in Rust.

#14: Grounded (PC/Xbox One/Xbox Series X/S)

GROUNDED Super Duper Game Update 1.2

Whereas the main antagonistic force of the last game was your fellow man, in Grounded you and your friends will find yourselves facing off against endless hordes of something much more diabolical: the bugs living in your backyard. 

Grounded is set in the year 1990, where four teenagers who are the latest in a string of teenage disappearances wake up to find they’ve been shrunken down to be little bigger than ants and left to fend for themselves in the massive and hostile environment of a suburban backyard. Players can either go in solo or team up with friends in co-op as they set out to unravel the mystery behind who is responsible for them being shrunken down while having to fend off hostile critters of all shapes and sizes, ranging from swarms of angry ants, towering praying mantises, and even dark and disturbing nests filled with spiders. Using a unique selection of craftable tools and a series of selectable character upgrades and mutations, it’s up to players to go big, or never go home.

Not only will the teens need to fend off swarms of bugs and insects to stay alive, but they will also need to think creatively in order to prevent starvation and dehydration. Players can follow a Ladybug to find food or grill up some aphids if they’re hungry, and can cut down towering blades of grass to drink dew droplets, among other ways to keep themselves from succumbing to the elements around them. After keeping yourselves fed, you’ll then need to craft a series of weapons and equipment to fend off the bugs while exploring the many environments in the backyard, ranging from a sandbox full of angry termites to a pond full of massive, hungry koi fish. Across the biomes in Grounded are unique resources to be acquired by the players, so they can not only make weapons and armor to defend themselves with, but also build massive, elaborate, or just plain pretty bases to store their supplies and defend themselves within. 

Unlike the previous game on the list, Grounded has an overarching storyline where the teens discover they are in the backyard of a strange scientist who is responsible for shrinking the teens named Dr. Wendell Tully, who as luck would have it, has built a miniature laboratory inside an oak tree in the backyard. Inside the lab players will meet a malfunctioning robot called BURG.L, who promises to restore the teens to their proper size once repaired. This will lead the teens and the players across a surprisingly vast journey to uncover the truth, restore the teen's memories surrounding their shrinkage, and ultimately restore their size, so long as they can survive in the hostile backyard long enough to reach their goal.

Grounded was developed by Obsidian Entertainment, most known for being the developers behind Fallout: New Vegas among many other entertaining story-based games across various genres. After first being released in early access in 2020, then fully released in 2022 while still continuing to see new updates, Grounded has since seen over 15 million unique players as of December 2022 and was nominated for a series of awards after its full release, including the ‘Xbox Game of the Year’ award which it won at the 2022 Golden Joystick Awards.

Single-player or co-op story-focused survival games are just as if not even more entertaining to play than the competitively natured online multiplayer-focused survival games, and Grounded is a great example of that potentiality. With its unique setting and the wide range of content it provides, along with the fact the game still receives content updates from the developers, Grounded is a highly enjoyable addition to the survival genre that stands tall among its peers despite the diminutive stature of its characters. Whether you’re a fan of going it alone or playing alongside friends, Grounded is a game you absolutely should check out if you’re a fan of survival games of all shapes and sizes.

Four teens fight for their survival against endless swarms of giant ants, spiders, wasps, and more as they try to uncover the mystery behind why they were shrunk down to the size of bugs. In Grounded, players will have to go big, or else they will never go home.

#13: Project Zomboid (PC/Mac/Linux)

Project Zomboid Trailer - This Is How I Died

In July 1993, a foul smell in the air was the only warning sign of the coming plague that carved a swift and decisive path of destruction across Knox Country, formerly Knox County, an area around Muldraugh and West Point Kentucky. Unofficially dubbed the “Knox Event”, the mysterious illness caused those infected to slowly grow sicker and sicker until their eventual death, where the infected are then reanimated as walking corpses with an insatiable hunger for human flesh, who themselves spread the infection to others with just a single bite. The Knox Plague spread rapidly across the population and forced the government to evacuate those they could before walling off the Knox Exclusion zone, leaving only the undead and scattered survivors such as yourself trapped inside.

Selling itself as “the ultimate in zombie survival”, Project Zomboid puts players smack in the middle of an already widespread zombie outbreak with no objective but to survive for as long as they can. When beginning a game players will create their survivor using several selectable traits that range from both positive and negative, with positive trait choices including being extra quiet when sneaking past zombies, along with negative choices like being completely deaf in both ears. You will also have a list of “Occupations” to choose from that both give your character some background and additional stat bonuses, like the Park Ranger occupation making you better suited to surviving in the woods, or the Farmer occupation giving you an early boost to, obviously, your farming skill. The trait system is balanced by each trait having positive or negative point markers, meaning that if you choose a positive trait that leaves you with -3 points, you’ll have to choose negative traits that counterbalance the point score back to 0 before being able to continue into the game.

Once players are actually in the world of Project Zomboid they’ll be placed inside a random house, typically in a less populated area, and are then left to do whatever they want from then on out. Players can first gain context clues to the growing situation by listening to certain TV or radio stations, or they can simply go outside and suddenly start being surrounded by the undead. Players can turn off all the lights and close the curtains to hide in their house, gather up everything useful inside a garbage bag and set out into the world, burn down houses in their neighborhood, hotwire a car and speedily escape to somewhere new, and so many more choices on top of that which I just don’t have the room to thoroughly yell at you about in this one small chunk of an overall large list of games.

Virtually everything you can think of can be picked up in Zomboid, from individual books or cans of food to ripping the bedsheets off your bed and using them as makeshift bandages, you really are free to do whatever you can think of in the world of Project Zomboid, including raiding stores in the middle of town to building up a defensive fortress to hide in during the winter out in the middle of nowhere. The amount of detail the game possesses is a testament to the devotion of the game’s development team, The Indie Stone, who have been working on Project Zomboid since 2011 and continue to update it even now. It should be said though that The Indie Stone is far from the speediest dev team out there, sometimes due to their own faults and sometimes not, as the game has been publicly available on Steam since 2013, and since 2013 the game is still considered to be in “Early Access”, meaning it still technically isn’t a fully released game, and as such can have features randomly added or removed at the whim of the devs. Though smaller patch updates are still common, the last major “Build” change update was in December 2021, and the next major update still doesn’t have any official release date.

In the end, though Project Zomboid likely won’t be “finished” anytime soon, the game currently still has some of the best hardcore realism to be found in any zombie survival game on the market today. Plus with the game’s custom sandbox modifications, along with its selectable challenge scenarios, you can make your zombie survival experience as easy or as impossible as you see fit. If you’re looking for a zombie apocalypse that you can thoroughly immerse yourself in, just without the actually being eaten alive part, then Project Zomboid is currently one of the best games out there to give you that experience.

Fight off hordes of infected undead, gather food and supplies, and endure the endless deadly hurdles that the world throws at you for as long as you can. But no matter how hard you try to survive, always remember: this is still the story of how you died.

#12: Raft (PC)

Raft - The Final Chapter Trailer

Set in an open-world sandbox unlike most others, Raft is a survival game that leaves its players stranded on a small makeshift raft in the middle of an endlessly blue ocean. All you have to keep you alive is your minuscule raft and a hook made of old plastic attached to a rope, which you’ll have to use to gather debris and supplies as they drift past your raft if you want to expand your raft’s size, construct new equipment, and most importantly prevent yourself from dying of starvation and dehydration. As you build improvements for your raft and continue to drift across the ocean, you’ll encounter the ruins of civilization in the form of abandoned oil rig platforms, remnants of cities submerged beneath the waves, the occasional rare natural landmass that hasn’t been flooded over yet, and many more waterlogged remains of the old world as you continue on your quest to uncover the rumored “Utopia” drifting somewhere out over the waves…

After the polar ice caps melted and flooded the world, the globe’s elite left civilization behind to live in luxurious floating cities while the rest of the world was left to fend for itself. Unfortunately for you, you are part of “the rest”, meaning that your main goal in Raft is to collect supplies primarily with your throwable hook to expand your raft from a meager two squares to anything your imagination can think of, while simultaneously stumbling across islands or old-world ruins that come with unique new loot as well as new potential dangers to face. Whether you choose to play solo or co-op with friends, the overall objective remains the same: upgrade your raft to go from merely drifting to actually controlling a proper vessel, gather necessary materials to create farm plots and machines to purify water on your boat and avoid your untimely demise that can come either from a lack of food, or you yourself becoming food for the shark constantly harassing your raft.

Along with simply surviving and crafting upgrades, Raft also includes the possibility of finding other NPC survivors either on ruined oil platforms or lonely islands, along with the chance of finding animals on certain islands that you can bring onto your boat to gather resources from them as well. And for those of you who enjoy a splash of narrative elements to your survival game, there is also a storyline to follow that involves the player character Maya trying to find her husband and daughter while following in the metaphorical footsteps of other survivors, locating new story-specific locations and new enemies as well whilst on her quest to reunite her family. And nothing’s more compelling than surviving for your family, right?

Raft often sees comparisons to the 1995 film Waterworld, for reasons you can probably guess, and was given high praise for its unique take on the open-world survival concept, as while an on-land map can be limiting at times, the virtually infinite open seas in Raft make you really feel like you can go all around the world. Whether the world of Raft inspires you to conquer any fear you have of the ocean or drives you to survive despite your fears out of pure spite, you will still have to remain diligent for survival supplies drifting by and against unseen threats from the ocean depths below if you want to stay alive. If you think you have what it takes to brave the submerged world of Raft all on your own, that’s great. But if you were to ask me, I’d say if you can get a few friends to come along for the ride, that’ll make your slow descent into an ironic death from dehydration all the more enjoyable.

Use your trusty hook on a rope to gather food, water, and supplies to upgrade your measly raft into the vessel of your dreams, all while pursuing a grander story and trying to avoid being eaten by a surprisingly persistent shark!

#11: V Rising (PC)

V Rising - Gameplay Trailer

Moving from the endless waves of one unique survival game to the blood-soaked shadows of the next, we take a look at one of the most recently released games on this list, V Rising. In V Rising, you awaken after centuries of sleep as a weakened vampire in a world you no longer hold any power over, and you must set out into a world filled with dangers both new and old, venturing across multiple expansive biomes and feasting on blood to reclaim your lost strength and reestablish yourself as the one true ruler of the night. Just make sure you don’t get caught in the sunlight while you’re out feasting.

V Rising is not only unique in that you play as a vampire trying to survive, but it’s also a unique standout on this list thanks to its isometric top-down view combined with its precise WASD controls and cursor-based aiming system, leaving behind the point-and-click walk style of most isometric games in a greatly enjoyable fashion. You will have to aim your skill shots and quickly be able to dodge incoming projectiles when fighting against the wide variety of enemies in the game, ranging from massively sized wild beats, monstrous constructs of living trees or masses of melted flesh, and even squads of Holy Knights trying to put an end to your evil pursuits. When it comes time for combat you will be able to mold your vampire to your preferred playstyle using a combination of the various weapons you can find across the world and the variety of vampiric spells you can unlock by growing stronger over time.

But seeing as you are a vampire, feasting on blood and slaughtering your enemies simply for survival is far from all that you deserve to experience, a being of your unimaginable power deserves to live the undead life in luxury. That’s why V Rising also features the ability to construct your very own vampiric castles out of materials gathered across the world, which not only gives you a place to build crafting stations and to hide away from the sun within but also a fully customizable space where you can build a towering, multi-story castle however you see fit. Once you have constructed the castle of your dreams, you can then set out to claim humans as your mind-controlled servants, or even go online to team up alongside other vampires in PVE servers, or to go against rival vampires in PVP servers.

As of January 2023, V Rising has already sold over 3 million copies despite only having been released in May 2022, and still being in early access on top of that. Developers Stunlock Studios continues to work hard on V Rising, giving out bi-monthly community updates and semi-regular Hotfix updates when needed, with the latest of which being their promise in September of this year that they will be releasing their massive 1.0 full-launch update sometime in the second quarter of 2024, giving fans new and old something to look forward to in the relatively near future.

Though some in the past have criticized V Rising’s resource gathering and crafting aspect as being somewhat time-consuming, the majority of those who have played the game can attest that the open world setting, the combat elements, and the unique bosses that players will encounter make V Rising an excellent example for the survival game genre. Whether it’s the thrilling combat mechanics, the Gothic-inspired open world, or the thrill of growing to be an all-powerful vampire that draws you in and makes you want to play the game for yourself, V Rising provides an all-around enjoyably unique take on the open-world survival genre that you’ll really want to sink your fangs into once you start playing.

Arise from a centuries-long slumber a weakened vampire, and slowly regain your strength by wreaking havoc across the world as you slowly regain your status as the rightful ruler of the night. Will you be the one to become the next Dracula?

#10: Medieval Dynasty (PC/PS4/PS5/Xbox One/Xbox Series X/S)

Medieval Dynasty - Official Next-Gen Console Cinematic Launch Trailer

In the harsh wilderness of Europe in the Middle Ages, noble families bound by both clergy and the crown ruled over the lands, bringing in just as much trade and prosperity as they did greed and distrust. This greed and distrust, when mixed with the pride and egos of noble kings, results in military conflicts breaking out across the nations, bringing the chaos of war to your doorstep as entire continents threaten to be changed forever. But with change looming on the horizon, you find yourself given the opportunity to leave your mark in the history books.

Medieval Dynasty is a survival game like many others, but what makes it unique is that while most games have you focusing solely on your own survival, this game puts the pressure of ensuring an entire village’s survival on your shoulders. In Medieval Dynasty, you begin your game as just another ordinary, generally useless peasant in the Middle Ages who recently fled from the horrors of war that are ravaging the rest of the country, intent on taking your fate into your own hands. You’ll start out all alone in the wilderness, gathering supplies and hunting for food to ensure your survival as you slowly begin to build up not just your home, but homes and even businesses for other settlers looking for a place to settle down in and call home. Over time, you will grow from your humble beginnings as an inexperienced survivor to a proud leader of a village you built from the ground up with your own two hands.

Once you’ve built a town and enough people have come to live in it, your priorities will focus from just yourself to the town as a whole, as it will be up to you to manage the farming operations, the defenses of the town, and even to prepare for the long and cruel winters that are inevitably going to sweep over your civilization, among other unexpected events that will be encountered along your journey. There is an actual narrative storyline for players to follow through set story chapters alongside just simply surviving, which will inevitably lead your character to settle down with another in your village so you can have children to, as the game’s name suggests, begin carving out your own royal dynasty that you must ensure will last for generations to come.

Medieval Dynasty gives players a large and beautifully realistic world to explore, complete with a dynamic day/night cycle, realistic weather conditions, and all four seasons of the year to boot. As you play you’ll earn skill points to use in a detailed skill tree that allows for every player to develop their character specifically to their individual whims, and over time your reputation in the world will grow as you play, leading you to find encounters and decisions that will have direct effects on the world around you. And with the game’s Dynasty reputation system, you might even just find yourself having a sudden and unexpected meeting with the local King, among many more strange encounters to be discovered.

I can’t think of many survival games that let you settle down with a woman to start raising children, regardless of the time period setting it’s taking place in. That fact alone makes Medieval Dynasty one of the more unique games on this list, even ignoring its main gameplay aspect of building and becoming the leader of your very own settlement in the Middle Ages. In my opinion, this game still needs a bit more polish and a few more major updates to really elevate it from simply being “good” to actually being “great”. But, with that said, what’s currently available for you to go and play around with in Medieval Dynasty still makes it an enjoyable game all around, and another fun addition to this list on top of that.

Build your very own medieval town from the ground up, fall in love, and have children who will carry on your own royal dynasty for generations to come in this Middle Ages civilization-centered survival sim.

#9: No Man’s Sky (PC/Mac/PS4/PS5/Xbox One/Xbox Series X/S/Nintendo Switch/iPad)

No Man's Sky: Singularity - Official Trailer

Although it’s more than fair to acknowledge that the game leading us into the single digits on this list had a rather rough launch way back in 2016, it’s also just as fair for us to acknowledge that, just over seven years later here in 2023, the team behind No Man’s Sky had done plenty to right the ship and make up for their past mistakes and shortcomings, and they show no signs of slowing down either. While yes, No Man’s Sky’s original launch didn’t live up to its original expectations, and the immediate post-launch silence from developers Hello Games soured the general public’s view on the game, since then Hello Games has released many post-launch updates featuring a wide array of new content, all at no additional costs beyond the purchase of the main game. Over the years these post-launch major updates have added new multiplayer features, base-building components, ground vehicles, entire space fleet creation and management systems, and even entirely new alien races to meet, along with plenty of other additions that have since brought No Man’s Sky ever closer to what players were originally looking for when it first launched.

For those who don’t know, No Man’s Sky is a game where players are able to explore an entire uncharted galaxy and beyond with virtually limitless freedom. The game begins with the player character, an ambiguously humanoid planetary explorer called the Traveller, waking up on a random planet near the wreckage of a crashed starfighter, which players will have to repair by using their “Multi-tool” to scan the planet’s fauna and materials which you’ll then gather and use to repair your ship, so you can then fly free from the confines of the planet below and soar into the stars above and beyond. What defines No Man’s Sky and makes it unique among most other games about traveling through space is that nearly every piece of the galaxy, including every star, every planet, the flora and fauna of these planets, and even the encounters to be had with other sentient alien life forms are all created through procedural generation systems, meaning that every planet you land on is almost if not entirely unique compared to one another, whether it's in big ways or small.

No Man’s Sky’s survival aspect comes mostly from the dangers you’ll encounter on your adventures across the universe, which usually come in the form of hostile creatures on alien worlds, pirates engaging you in fast-paced space battles, or space-police-controlled security robots intent on gunning you down if you misbehave a bit too much. You can also get into it with the various other lifeforms in the universe, such as intergalactic convoys of trade ships or sprawling space stations of both friendly and hostile varieties, and you might even become foes(or friends) with another player, as No Man’s Sky’s multiplayer components have cross-console capabilities, meaning that every player no matter their current console of choice is technically existing in the same universe all at once.

Over the course of the Traveler’s adventures, they will encounter other dangers, such as hostile planetary environments that will deteriorate their space suit, which means the player will have to find ways to either get crafting components to upgrade their gear or to simply purchase better equipment, including upgrades to your customizable spaceship. While you can find plenty of resources by mining away materials across planets, there are also a wide variety of ways to make money in order to purchase certain specific upgrades, such as adventuring to distant planets to scan various alien plants or creatures into an intergalactic database using your Multi-tool, or more dangerous professions like becoming a pirate and stealing supplies, or even becoming a bounty hunter that preys on the pirates instead. You can even become an intergalactic trader, ferrying precious cargo from one space station to another across the vast wonders of space, along with so many more ways to make a living and explore the universe however you like. It’s your voyage in No Man’s Sky, how it plays out is entirely up to you.

There’s plenty more content and details that I could go over when it comes to No Man’s Sky, details of both the bad from its launch to the good of the plentiful amounts of free post-game content that Hello Games have implemented since then, but if I did that then we’d run out of space in this blog, so I’ll just skip to the more recent stuff. This past August gave us the 7th anniversary of No Man’s Sky, and with that anniversary we got a frankly massive update that added content such as a new sentient robot race, the first post-game race to be added to date, along with overhauled space combat that introduces freighter-to-freighter combat, the ability to become Multi-Tool scrap merchants thanks to the additions of new weapons, and plenty more additions big and small. 

Though the game’s original sub-par launch probably left a sour taste in your mouth whether you played it or not, trust me when I tell you that now, seven years later, the game has seen vast improvements thanks to tireless efforts from developers Hello Games. As it stands now I would say that No Man’s Sky is one of the best space-exploration games on the market today, and in fact, I’ll even go so far as to say that you can compare it positively to the recently released Starfield from Bethesda. Whether or not you’re thinking about buying this game if you haven’t already, I fully recommend that you at least go and check out some of the many gameplay updates that have been added since its launch on YouTube or wherever else. Because I have faith that you won’t be left disappointed by what you’ll discover in the new and improved No Man’s Sky.

Discover new worlds, encounter alien races, learn how to speak their language, engage in high-velocity space dogfights with pirates, and so much more as you slowly unravel the mystery of what lies at the center of the universe in No Man’s Sky.

#8: Valheim (PC/Linux/Xbox One/Xbox Series X/S)

Valheim: Mistlands Gameplay Trailer

We will now find ourselves moving from the starry skies of our universe to the unknown lands of an entirely new realm in our next game, Valheim. In Valheim, which is both the name of the game and the world you find yourself in, you are a Viking warrior who was slain in battle back on Earth, and now your spirit has been carried to the illusive tenth realm of Yggdrasil, the world tree of Norse mythology. In this strange purgatory, Odin himself reveals to you that if you want to fully move on to the fabled halls of the Norse afterlife, you will need to prove your might as a warrior one last time by defeating the sworn enemies of Odin who are plaguing the realm of Valheim.

Valheim possesses a massive procedurally generated world for players to explore, filled with a slew of immersive and distinct biomes which themselves have uniquely deadly foes to be found within, as well as unique resources and crafting recipes to discover. Whether you’re playing alone or with up to nine other friends at once, you’ll be encountering creatures of various shapes, sizes, and levels of hostility which you’ll take on with a stamina-based combat system that rewards you for being prepared as well as skillful. While each weapon type comes with unique attack variations as well as different blocking styles, or ranged styles if you’re using a ranged weapon, you’ll also need to use tactful dodges and parries if you want to survive against the powerful foes that await in this purgatory.

There’s also plenty to do when you’re not venturing out to wage mighty battles worthy of any true Viking, the primary example being that you can construct yourself a mighty Viking longhouse and a surrounding village too if you see fit, using Valheim’s flexible building system that requires you to think both about the structural integrity of your buildings as well as the ventilation, so you don’t end up choking to death on your fireplace’s smoke because you forgot to add a chimney. Then, once you’ve decided where to build your main place of rest and relaxation, you can venture out further to build new outposts or reclaim old buildings, all of which you will be able to customize both inside and out however you see fit.

Since you’re technically already dead, Valhiem doesn’t make use of popular survival game systems like hunger in typical fashion, as not eating anything doesn’t punish you with starvation, but going out of your way to consume foods can reward you with buffs which can prove useful in battle. But even with strength-boosting foods, you still will have to go out to find the materials you need and to discover crafting recipes from across the world in order to build better equipment for yourself that you will need when it’s time to fight the deadliest foes in the tenth realm. When the time comes you will face off against mighty boss enemies that will require precise skill as well as strong enough equipment if you want to best your foe and prove yourself to Odin, lest you fail and find yourself having to start all over again.

Valheim is about three months from reaching its third year on Steam, and despite the game still being in Early Access, it’s already seen high praise from virtually everyone who’s played it for themselves. Not only does this game have an Overwhelmingly Positive score on Steam with over 358,000 user reviews, but it’s also won awards such as 2021 Game of the Year from PC Gamer and both the Best Debut and the Audience awards at the 2022 Game Developer’s Choice Awards. With over 10 million copies sold on Steam alone as of July 2022, it’s safe to say that the unique setting, the beautiful art style, and the wonderfully composed music of Valheim have more than won over the general audience of gaming fans all over the world. With PC Gamer calling this game a “rare exception among Early Access titles”, Valheim is a survival game that’s more than earned its praise, and more than deserves for you to give it a try for yourself.

After being slain in combat, you find yourself stranded in a strange purgatory between the realms, where you must prove your might as a Viking warrior one last time by surviving in this harsh new world and by slaying the enemies of Odin himself who dwell within.

#7: Green Hell (PC/PS4/Xbox One/Nintendo Switch)

Green Hell - Launch Trailer

Instead of a strange new realm beyond death, the next game on this list brings us back down to Earth in one of the worst ways imaginable, as Green Hell leaves its players fighting for their sanity as well as their lives inside the uncharted heart of the Amazonian rainforest. Either in single-player or in co-op with up to three friends, players will follow the story of anthropologist Jake Higgins, who along with his spouse Mia has come to the Amazon to make first contact with a tribal village of people called the Yabahuaca. When Jake wakes up and finds that Mia has gone ahead without him, all Jake has to keep in contact with her is his radio as he sets out after his wife, a simple decision that will unexpectedly lead Jake into a life-threatening fight for his very survival against the harshest elements that the jungle can throw at him.

Green Hell’s players will have to utilize real-life survival tactics in order to survive the hostile environment that is the Amazon, as there is no way to contact the outside world, leaving you entirely on your own. You will have to gather the necessary materials from the world around you to build your own tools, weapons, and even medical supplies if you wind up getting hurt by the plethora of aggressive and hungry creatures that live in the jungle, which is very likely to occur out there. You’ll have to prepare yourself to face expected dangers such as hungry crocodiles and venomous insects, as well as unexpected threats like psychedelic plants and even rogue members of the local indigenous tribe who seek to cut you down. Green Hell is not just a test of your physical survival but also your mental endurance, as the absolute isolation from the outside world combined with the dangers hiding within the Amazonian rainforest will slowly chip away at your sanity if you aren’t careful.

And when you need a moment to rest after a day’s worth of exploring the treacherous Amazon, you can also construct complex buildings to take shelter in, farm plots to sustainably grow food with, and tools like pull-carts and weight-based elevator systems to transport your supplies with. But don’t think that when you’re not fighting you’re entirely in the clear, as along with more obvious wounds like deep claw marks from a leopard, you’ll also have to use the “Body Inspection” mode to check for leeches, ticks, and other uninvited hanger-ons sucking away at your life force, causing you to become sick with disease and various other injuries. In the end, the world of Green Hell is just as beautiful as it is deadly, and it will require not just impressive survival skills but also an iron will if you hope to come out of the rainforest in mostly one piece.

Green Hell is what I would call one of the more “standard” survival games on this list, and I don’t mean that in an insulting way, I mean it in the sense that while most of the games on this list feature some kind of fantastical or unusual element to it, for the most part, Green Hell gives players a relatively realistic world for its players to survive in. And for some players, a more grounded setting can be just as if not more enjoyable a setting for their survival games, as it can show off that even our world can be filled with just as many mysteries and very real dangers as any fantasy setting. So in my opinion, Green Hell is a fantastic “sleeper pick” among the other games on this list, if I may be so bold. And I also think that if you’re a fan of survival games that feel closer to our world rather than the next, Green Hell is a game that’ll catch your interest pretty quickly.

Left stranded in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest and cut off from the outside world, you’ll have to test both your physical limits as well as your mental limits if you want to survive and to find out what happened to your missing spouse.

#6: SCUM (PC)

SCUM - Smokin' Hot v0.9 Trailer

Set in a not-so-distant future, the world is now ruled by the corporate elites of the top 1% who see themselves as the new rulers of Earth, leading to the biggest gap between the rich and the poor in the planet’s history, and while most of the population refuses to accept this fate and calls for justice, those who resist are taken to privately owned correctional facilities by oppressive police and military forces. As a means of keeping the world entertained enough to be distracted from their cruel reality, TEC1, the world’s global broadcasting company, launches a new 24/7 reality TV program where unfairly incarcerated prisoners who are sentenced to unjust death penalties will be parachuted onto a massive privately owned island and left to become modern-day gladiators in their new violent society for the entertainment of the world. And unfortunately for you, you are one of those prisoners.

SCUM stands out among other survival games thanks to its Hunger Games-esc setting of an island filled with sacrificial lambs fighting for the entertainment of a dystopian world. Up to 64 players can inhabit the island at once per server and are equipped with live bombs embedded in the back of their heads to prevent any potential escape attempts, forcing the island's prisoners to remain where they are and partake in this bloody and vicious reality show. The island itself is made up of 225 sq km of terrain, and filled with a wide range of biomes from dense forests, abandoned towns, sunny beaches, rundown airfields, and many more locations for players to explore and scavenge through, whether by land, air or sea, all while avoiding both hostile wildlife and hostile enemy players all at once.

Another addition to what makes SCUM unique is that it gives players the ability to manage even the smallest of details regarding their character, such as being able to control the systems of your character's metabolism, inertia during movements, and even the rate at which your wet clothing dries. It’s not necessary for those who don’t want to delve into it, but for those who do, the “BCU Monitor” keeps track of the usual stats like health and stamina on top of more unique stats like calories and vitamins among others, further allowing you to manage your character’s attributes, such as your strength, speed, carry weight and furthermore to the most accurate degree you desire. The realism doesn’t stop there as there are many more little details to keep track of, such as how if your character loses all of their teeth from combat you will need to learn how to liquidize your food in order to consume it, and that you’ll also have to keep track of your character’s toilet needs, which itself will then leave behind “physical evidence” for other players to track you with. 

SCUM proudly proclaims its desire to push the limits of multiplayer survival games and to give its players “unprecedented levels of character customization”, a goal which it generally succeeds at achieving not just through features like being able to lose teeth and the ability to use the toilet, but also through gameplay where your character will need to gain knowledge and actual skill in such actions as using guns, being physical, how to catch fish and more to actually be good at performing certain actions, instead of just being naturally gifted. When exploring the world of SCUM you will be able to build towering shelters for yourself like most survival games, as well as participate in certain PVP events across the island that earn you “Fame Points”, which you can use either to respawn if you happen to die or to purchase certain upgrades for your equipment and buildings, among other things. 

Whether you want to fight other players, build your own personal home base, or go exploring across the island, SCUM gives players the ability to do whatever they want and then some in an extremely realistic and detail-oriented fashion, which is done so in a way that miraculously doesn’t prevent players from being able to still have fun when playing. On top of its you-against-the-world gameplay atmosphere, if you’re interested in a survival game with an even higher standard for its realism features than most, SCUM might end up being the game you’ve been searching for.

Fight for your survival and for the mind-numbing entertainment of a dystopian world on the new hit reality TV show SCUM, where you can customize your character down to the smallest details in order to get an edge on your enemies.

#5: The Long Dark (PC/Mac/Linux/PS4/Xbox One/Nintendo Switch)

The Long Dark -- WINTERMUTE REDUX -- Launch Trailer (2018)

There are no zombies, no nuclear warheads, and no robot uprisings, only the endless cold and all the threats that Mother Nature can muster await you in the quiet apocalypse of The Long Dark. In this game, players must fight to survive against the harsh forces of nature whilst stuck deep in the Northern Canadian wilderness in a map spanning across twelve major interconnected regions that make up fifty+ square kilometers of world to explore. Players will have to think carefully about the decisions they make, from hunting for food to mapping out the world, every action will affect your hunger, thirst fatigue, and how much more of the cold you can resist before succumbing to your frigid end.

The Long Dark is one of the most brutal examples of the survival genre you can find, as the game itself boldly states there is “no hand holding” for its players, forcing them to entirely think for themselves, to make those drastic and potentially life-saving choices all on their own, meaning that players will have to earn their right to survive. From fishing to climbing, to exploring the world for life-saving gear, every action you take increases your hunger and thirst as well as your fatigue, forcing you to genuinely think carefully about what actions you can afford to take, otherwise you could succumb to conditions like hypothermia, frostbite, dysentery and more beyond. There are over one hundred tools to be found, including light sources, clothing, first aid supplies, weapons, and more, most of which require you to monitor their repair conditions carefully, or else you risk breaking and losing an important piece of equipment.

The Long Dark features three main modes, the most well-known mode being the award-winning Survival Mode, where the main objective is to survive and the only ending is with your death. In Survival mode you will select from one of the twelve regions to spawn into and begin your adventure across a frozen wilderness, gathering tools and resources in order to keep yourself warm and fed, while avoiding a grizzly end from either the frigid cold or one of several hostile wild animals, which include wolves and bears, among other huntable animals. Survival Mode can be played in four difficulties, those being “Pilgrim”, the easiest mode for a calm learning and exploration-based experience with lowered risks, “Voyager”, the standard mode where equipment can be found and needs erode at a normal rate while hostile animals will appear after 24 hours, “Stalker”, a punishing difficulty where useful gear spawns less and needs erode quickly while animals appear in larger numbers, and “Interloper”, the hardest difficulty where you are entirely unwelcome in Mother Nature’s plan.

The second-most known mode is the Story Mode told over an episodic adventure called “WINTERMUTE, which tells the story of bush pilot Will Mackenzie and Dr. Astrid Greenwood, with each episode giving players five-to-eight-plus hours of gameplay and roughly sixty minutes of cinematics to enjoy. In the first episode, after a mysterious flash of light in the sky causes their plane to crash into the rural wilderness of Bear Island, located in Northern Canada, Will wakes up to find himself separated from Astrid and begins his first steps on what will be a long journey across the frozen wastes of the North, where he will have to fight for survival, meet dozens of interesting individuals, and slowly begin to understand and come to terms with this new quiet apocalypse he now finds himself in. Along with the Survival and Story modes, there is also a wide range of Challenge Modes of varying difficulty for players to master for potential unlockable bonuses in Survival Mode, with challenges including such titles as Hopeless Rescue, As the Dead Sleep, and Escape the Darkwalker.

The Long Dark continues to see updates even in 2023, nine years since its Steam Early Access release in 2014, courtesy of developers Hinterland Studio. Along with various gameplay updates over the years, Hinterland even took to heart criticisms and feedback regarding their episodic Story Mode, going back and updating the gameplay, mission structure, and other details of the first two already released story episodes, showing their commitment to making sure that they can assuredly deliver their story to the players in the exact quality they set out to achieve at the beginning. It’s taken quite some time due to numerous pushbacks and development delays, but after the first two episodes were initially released in August 2017, the fifth and final episode of The Long Dark’s story is set to be released near the tail end of 2023.

When you think of the most brutal survival games on the market today, chances are you’ll inevitably put The Long Dark near the top of your list. From the Survival and Challenge modes that drop you into the cruel cold of the Canadian wilderness and leave you to fend for yourself with no backup whatsoever, to the brutal and heart-wrenching Story Mode that shows the dwindling hopes of humanity in a world they know is slowly marching to its final resting place, The Long Dark has a little piece of something for every fan of the survival genre out there.

Endure the freezing cold and survive every threat that Mother Nature can throw at you as you endure for as long as you can in the quiet apocalypse of The Long Dark.

#4: Generation Zero (PC/PS4/Xbox One)

Generation Zero - Official Resistance Update Trailer

The year is 1989 in the town of Östertörn, Sweden, where you assume the role of a dime-a-dozen teenager who returns home from an island excursion to discover that the town’s population has mysteriously disappeared and been replaced with an army of robots of all shapes and sizes, fitted with deadly weapons that they want to use on you! With your once peaceful town now overrun by the metal menace, it falls on you now to save your own skin by traversing across the vast Swedish wilderness, scavenging for supplies and weapons that will help you wage heart-pumping guerilla warfare against the robot scourge and ultimately take back your home.

Generation Zero’s version of the open-world survival formula makes its players feel like they’re taking part in a Terminator movie, as they’re thrown into a Cold War-era European countryside and left to fend for themselves against an army of deadly robots. Players will start out with relatively few supplies, so they’ll have to think tactically in order to avoid enemy detection before they’re sufficiently armed, maneuvering from out of sight between houses, stores, cars, or wherever else they happen to be before they can finally take the fight to the enemy. Whether you’re alone or with friends in online co-op, you’ll have to use intelligence just as you will brute strength if you want the Resistance to succeed.

The robot enemies you’ll encounter generally range from small hovering drone enemies, to medium-to-large-sized ground enemies, and massive robots that look like construction equipment brought to life with a truckload of weapons to boot. While it is possible to simply run in guns blazing to take down your foes, the game rewards you for carefully planning out your attacks in a number of ways. For example, certain robots have Night Vision and other features used to hunt you down that can be turned against them by throwing flares, or electrical disruption devices that break down a robot’s inner workings and stun them. Every robot also has different weak points that reward you for carefully aiming your shots.

One of the few bonuses of fighting swarms of robots is that once you destroy one robot, you’ll be able to loot their remains for parts and equipment which you can then use to upgrade your equipment and weapons as well as being able to craft new ones. But fighting off the robots is far from an easy task, despite how easy it may sound, so the game fully recommends that running and hiding in buildings or the dark woods, then coming back to fight later is a viable strategy. Especially since each robot enemy in the world is designed specifically to remain consistent with the world, meaning that if you break off the armor of one robot and then leave that area of the map for however many hours before returning, that same robot will continue to function with whatever damage it sustained up to that point. 

Generation Zero, in short, does a good job of immersing you in the world of late 80s Sweden which’s been flooded with deadly robots, hard as it might be to imagine yourself in such a place. The survival aspects of this game are more focused on combat than eating and drinking to sustain yourself, however, in case that’s a downside for you specifically. But if entering the role of a member of the human resistance fighting against your would-be robot overlords is enough immersion for you, then I think Generation Zero will leave you just as satisfied as any other game on our list.

On your own or with your friends, fight for the survival of the human race against an uprising of deadly machines set in a Swedish Cold War-era town during the late 1980s.

#3: Oxygen Not Included (PC/Mac/Linux)

Oxygen Not Included [Official Launch Trailer]

Getting into our top three games now, in our next game the focus shifts dramatically from focusing on your own survival to ensuring the survival of an entire colony of people who are lost in space. Oxygen Not Included is a “space-colony survival game” where you start out with three settlers called Duplicates, getting their name from the cloning machine at the heart of your colony that “duplicates” them, who are stuck inside of an alien space rock drifting through space. It now falls on your shoulders to ensure the survival of your Duplicates by digging out the asteroid and building an entire colony for them to sleep, eat, bathe, and overall live in with the hopes of one day ensuring that this colony can become entirely self-sufficient. And when that day comes, you can then look to the stars…

Oxygen Not Included tricks players with its creative and generally pleasing art style into thinking that it’s just any other ordinary “casual game”, when in fact it’s a surprisingly in-depth colony builder that will require you to take every mood of your Duplicate colonists into account when building your base. You will have to ensure that they have somewhere to grow food, somewhere to sleep, somewhere to use the bathroom, and plenty of other needs big or small that will affect the overall productivity of your colony. Most importantly of all, you will have to ensure that your Duplicates don’t run out of oxygen, as it’s entirely possible that you could wind up with too many breathing lungs and not enough oxygen to go around if you aren’t careful. And here you almost thought the game’s name was just a snappy title, didn’t ya?

On top of managing the needs and the overall air level, you will also have to pay attention to what the colony itself needs in order to run smoothly. If you build toilets or showers for your Duplicates, you’ll need to set up a pipe system throughout the colony to ensure that clean water is pumped in from a natural source and then pumped back out elsewhere, the same goes with building air vents to direct both oxygen and air of a certain temperature to wherever it’s required, and finally managing electrical wiring to make sure everything has the power to run smoothly. And when you’re not managing the colony itself, you’ll have to prepare your Duplicates to venture out into the wider surroundings of the asteroid you’re trapped within, preparing them with the necessary equipment to enter areas devoid of oxygen, or worse, areas filled with strange diseases that could end up infecting your entire colony.

Oxygen Not Included is one of my favorite games on this list, from one of my favorite indie developers Klei Entertainment, who you might also know from their other games like Don’t Starve. To me, there’s something greatly satisfying in the micromanaging of your very own custom-built colony, of knowing that every stride forward your Duplicates are able to take is because you helped them get there, and though it’s not the typical survival game in the sense that you’re playing in an open-world map through a first-person experience, Oxygen Not Included can still be one of the more viscous survival experiences out there if you get caught unprepared. So if you’re willing to try a game that’s a little bit off the beaten path of the “usual” survival games, I fully recommend that you give Oxygen Not Included a try. Just remember to breathe if you do, all right?

Take charge of a space colony populated with resilient clones and lead them to survival, luxury, and beyond while trapped in the heart of a mysterious asteroid, all while making sure your colonists don’t run out of oxygen.

#2: DayZ (PC/PS4/Xbox One)

DayZ - Official Cinematic Trailer

Returning to one of the many worlds of the walking undead, we take a look at one of the most well-known survival games of the 2010s, DayZ. Dayz started its existence as a zombie survival mod for the game Arma 2, a tactical shooter simulator that’s known for accurate-to-life realism, realism which bled over to DayZ to make it just as realistic as the Arma series, but with an entirely new undead twist. Set in the fictional post-Soviet Republic of Chernarus, the original setting of Arma 2, you are one of the scattered few who have survived so far against a mysterious plague that has turned most of the population into violent, flesh-hungry “infected” which you will have to fight to survive against, or else you’ll find yourself becoming just another member of their horde.

DayZ now exists as its own standalone game that was released back in 2018 after a five-year Steam Early Access period and continues to regularly achieve over 50,000 concurrent daily players even after all those years. And seeing as DayZ is an exclusively multiplayer game, most of the time you’ll find that other players might end up being just as if not an even bigger threat than the shambling hordes of undead. But whether it’s other players or zombies, you’ll still need to gather the necessary weapons and supplies so you can fight off your foes, treat your injuries, keep yourself full of food and fluids, and even find decent clothing to keep yourself warm if need be. Nobody ever said surviving the apocalypse was easy, and if anyone ever did, they probably got themselves eaten by now.

Along with keeping yourself healthy and your stomach full, you will also need to keep an eye out for useful items like backpacks if you want to carry your supplies around, as having too many items and too little space will leave you slowed down, making you into an easily caught meal for any lucky zombie nearby. You’ll need to take every precaution when exploring the world, whether hunting zombies or hunting animals for food, as every location can be teaming with untold zeds and other players just as desperate to survive as you are, so you’ll need to decide what weapon you’re willing to risk breaking through combat or how many bullets you’re willing to part with, and then counterbalance it by asking how much food or medicine you have left, and how desperate are you to get more. And even if the risk-reward scale seemed to balance in your favor, there’s no telling just how badly your luck will go. Survival is only the prolonging of the inevitable after all, and sometimes the inevitable is closer than you might think.

It’s safe to say that most people would point to DayZ as being one of the founding fathers of the formula for most post-2010 Zombie survival games, because sure you had your Dead Rising and your Left 4 Dead zombie games back then, but DayZ’s style of scrounging for every tiny little thing you can while hoping you don’t get bitten while you’re at has spread to many other zombie games after it started getting popular, befitting of its infectious nature. Take a look at Project Zomboid earlier in the list, at its core the two are very similar games, while of course still having plenty of obvious differences between them, but those same words can be said for many of the popular zombie games that have cropped up during the 2010s if you think about it. So, with that all said, I find it quite safe to say that if you’re looking for one of the best zombie survival sims out there, then you can’t go wrong with picking up one of the best there is in DayZ.

In a world overrun with undead and resources becoming scarce, will you team up with others to become stronger together, or become the lone wolf to avoid inevitable betrayal? How long will your story last when trying to survive the apocalypse?

That’s fourteen great survival games I’ve talked about so far. A frankly large number of titles, all of which came make for incredibly enjoyable experiences for any fan of the genre. But fourteen games is not nearly as satisfying as fifteen games now is it? So, let’s round out this list with one last game…

#1: Sons of the Forest (PC)

Sons of the Forest - Exclusive Official Release Date Trailer

In our #1 game on today’s list, we turn our attention to the game Sons of the Forest, a sequel to simply just The Forest, a survival horror game that’s been a fan favorite since all the way back in 2014 and is now coming back again for a whole new decade. Set many years after the events of The Forest, a group of private military contractors is hired by the company PuffCorp to be dispatched to a mysterious island known internally as “Site 2”, with the mission of locating Edward Puffton, the founder and CEO of PuffCorp, along with his wife Barbra and 20-year-old daughter Virginia, all of whom have been missing for several months after mysteriously vanishing during a visit to Site 2. But during your arrival, you and your team’s helicopters are somehow brought down. Though you miraculously survived the crash, soon afterward you are knocked unconscious by a mysterious man in a silver jacket…

You awaken sometime later, either on your own or with friends in online co-op, where you discover that unlike in The Forest, you are joined by a fellow survivor Kelvin, an NPC who has both gone deaf and lost the ability to speak due to the crash, meaning that you will have to help Kelvin to a certain degree as you begin your new lives as survivors on the island. Unfortunately for you, you’ll soon realize that you aren’t alone on this island either, as this island is populated by a terrifying army of cannibals and other terrible mutated creatures that look more like demons than they do people. Your quest to complete your mission is quickly replaced with the goal of surviving in this cannibal-infested hellscape, an objective that is far easier said than done.

Sons of the Forest keeps many of the features from the first game, where you’ll primarily have to hunt for food in the forms of wild animals or fruits and fish, craft weapons and equipment to fend off the cannibalistic locals that are constantly watching from the shadows and build up defensive homesteads using the nature around you in order to get some semblance of peace, if only for a moment. But this sequel also provides plenty of new features, such as a new seasons system that can result in winter rolling through and making certain food sources more scarce, new and terrifying mutants to be discovered hiding in the dark, and even a new dark and insidious story to be uncovered across the island. But for the most part, it’s up to you and you alone to decide what happens next, as there are no NPCs or voices in your ear giving you orders. How you choose to go forward in this survival horror is entirely up to you.

Sons of the Forest held the small but still notable distinction of being the most wish-listed game on Steam ahead of its release, even surpassing Starfield in the process. And even though developers Endnight Games had to delay the game twice, the game still sold over 2 million copies within twenty-four hours of its launch, with over 250,000 individual concurrent players in-game at once on launch day, making it the best-selling game on the entire Steam platform at the time. Though the game’s storyline is currently unfinished and the game still has occasional performance issues due to still being in Early Access, the game is still highly praised for its improvements over the original game, such as a larger map and improved enemy AI, along with praise for it’s beautiful, immersive, and incredibly scary world that it quite literally drops its players into.

The Forest was one of the most well-known survival horror games of the late 2010s thanks to popularization by some well-known YouTube figureheads, a status which it could only obtain to begin with thanks to its frightening world setting and immersive survival gameplay elements. Sons of the Forest captures everything that made The Forest great and continues to improve upon it through generally consistent gameplay updates that continue to add new content, making it a worthy sequel to its popular predecessor. Though Sons of the Forest still has some big steps to go before it can be a finished product, what the game offers to players currently already makes it an enjoyable survival game experience that can be utterly terrifying at times. With the Halloween season setting upon us, I can’t think of a better survival game to leave you in a panic-induced cold sweat, and a better game to be put in our #1 spot on this list than Sons of the Forest.

Your mission to rescue a missing billionaire turns into a mission of your own survival after crash-landing on a cannibal-infested island, forcing you to fight for your life against a terrifying mutant army in Sons of the Forest.

Conclusion

And that’s the end of this list, I’m afraid. There are still plenty of great survival games that we unfortunately don’t have time to talk about here, but the fifteen games that we do have still make for a pretty great list if I may be so bold.

But what did you think about this list? Do you like the selection of games on it, or are there others that you would rather have seen instead? If you’ve got a thought to share, do feel free to put it in the comments below, because I would be more than happy to read about what you thought of this post.